The question of I

Forgive me for not dealing more abstractly with your questions, but I've always used stories and intuition to try to make sense of the world.When I was a kid, I used to go to the wooded creek and sit on the bank, sometimes just to read or daydream or sulk.One day I was staring at the horizon, daydreaming, as the sun set and stars began to appear. Entranced, I eventually simply forgot who I was--literally--realized I had, and then found myself experiencing an overwhelming vertigo as I flailed mentally, trying to remember my name, and what that name meant: Who was I? What did it mean that I could forget?It seemed to me that in that moment of almost purely unself-conscious awareness, there was no difference at all between me and anyone else; this "I" was just a place, and awareness would be the same in any other place, any other person. The more clearly aware I became, the more I was just like other people: the details--what I looked like, where I lived, my family--were trivial compared to this identical awareness. I could have easily been someone else or no one at all. I felt both extraordinarily unlikely and inevitable at the same time--as though the world had be some kind of world but not this one, and I had to be some kind of me, but not this one. Later, as an artist, I learned that one practical consequence was that the more deeply personal I could make my art, the more likely others were to see it as universal.I became an atheist on that river bank some time later. Raised in a fire-and-brimstone church, I worried about being wrong, and I thought about spending forever in hell. I thought about how, when I injured my hand badly, I ran and howled, aware of nothing but flaming pain: there hadn't been me and the pain, only that incandescent pain that blotted out everything else. So, I wondered, if you were in the most horrible pain imaginable for a very long time, how could you be anyone at all?I could literally forget who I was just by orienting all my awareness outward or by a fullness of pain; an eternity of pain, I decided, would erase me altogether, and there would just be pain. If I couldn't be me forever in the face of that kind of pain, then hell certainly didn't make any sense: Why beat a dead boy? I was greatly relieved. And if God did exist and wanted to collect an immense cavern filled with people so tormented they became nothing but pain, well, fuck him, too. Then I wondered how long you could remain you in heaven as well. Both heaven and hell repulsed me because they both reduced awareness to mere sensation: pain on one hand, pleasure on the other. Hell and Heaven, I decided, belonged not to that soaring awareness I had experienced but with the vulnerable body that created them from fear and desire.It was about that time that I wondered if we had put God at the wrong end of eternity, as a cause rather than a possibility. But I was also reading precociously in science fiction, so...I came to believe that the important thing I had in common with other people was not the species particulars of legs and arms and genitals, but that search light of awareness. Later, I learned that letting "me" slip away was the zen of tennis, the zen of pot throwing, the zen of running down a steep path without falling, the zen of making love...everything.This I was not only slippery, it was also often slow and stupid.Perhaps all possible awareness, rather than awarenesses, is realized; perhaps the space of possible awareness is continuous and complete, while that of possible humans is lumpy and largely irrelevant. Your memories and contingent details create an I, but those fall away the more fully you turn your awareness outward, until there is no difference between I's. Our births don't introduce awareness into the universe, and our deaths don't remove it.Awareness is what is left when you subtract our messy individual instantiations, and perhaps awareness is what the universe does as inevitably as it expands and coalesces into stars and planets and, at least this once, me. But if there is identity between one instance of awareness and others, then awareness is what remains when I don't.Hell, I don't know. I'll go sit by the river tomorrow and let you know how it goes.Edited by Omnivorous, : No reason given.

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Dost thou prate, rogue?
-Cassio

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Real things always push back.
-William James

I took cavediver as saying that his awareness has always existed for him; nor can his awareness ever experience death: his awareness and death cannot ever coexist, nor, for similar reasons, can "before" have any meaning for his awareness.But hey, I drank the orange sunshine kool-aid when a barrel was genuinely a four-way hit, so take that for what's it worth...I'd like my shrooms in a brown paper bag with the dark dung stains that denote freshness.DISCLAIMER: This post is for entertainment purposes only. Any actions posited as committed by me, living or dead, are assuredly fictitious. Any resemblance between the contents of this post and reality are purely coincidental and have no practical value for law enforcement agents. Edited by Omnivorous, : Added standard disclaimer.

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Dost thou prate, rogue?
-Cassio

​

Real things always push back.
-William James

I agree that some suggestive evidence points to awareness being eternal; but I know of no sensible evidence that suggests a particular instance of it is eternal.Our awareness turns off and on, the cycle clearly having had no effect on the world. Consider a patient on the operating table: awareness continued uninterrupted, but not the particular anesthetized awareness that stopped and then resumed.Did you have some particular evidence in mind for an eternal individual instance of awareness?

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Dost thou prate, rogue?
-Cassio

​

Real things always push back.
-William James

I'll take that as a no.

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Dost thou prate, rogue?
-Cassio

​

Real things always push back.
-William James

Jar, I've also had the privilege of meeting and learning from some extraordinary people. I had no doubt then (and still don't) that they had indeed achieved a formidable mastery of awareness. Your description of their presence and impact is impeccable.I spent much of my youth and a good bit of my early adult life seeking out alternative spiritual teachings and experiences. The same year I experienced my crisis of intellectual atheism described in my post above, I began to experience powerful, pantheistic visions (long before any experimentation with deliberately altered consciousness), and began writing poetry termed, mischievously, metaphysical by the Nobel laureate with whom I eventually had the good fortune to study.So I found myself in the strange position of being an atheist with visions and metaphysical inspirations. I met Ram Dass (then Baba Ram Dass), Timothy Leary, the Dalai Lama, some Native American shamans (both North and South), a number of mendicant Buddhist monks--and once spent a few months at a monastery in Korea studying with a quietly charismatic monk who had been one of the most lethal people among the remarkably lethal ROK special forces. He tried to teach me to sit still and to fight without attachment: I used to tease him that he was teaching me the sound of one hand slapping.Most of them knew what I had been experiencing without my even raising the subject, replying with a variant of "I can see it" when I asked how they knew. The few Christian ministers I spoke with apparently saw nothing, were discomfited by my reports, and were mostly concerned about the devil, madness, or both.Minus the Christians, I think all of them would simply nod matter-of-factly at your description of encounters with external awarenesses. I have witnessed and experienced too much to dismiss the possibility of actual, direct, experiential knowledge of another awareness.The Dalai Lama has encouraged scientific investigation of physical and mental states achieved by monks--findings have included brain structure changes that correlate with meditative intent, a fascinating parallel to the fakir's mastery of autonomic processes and pain. It is a pity, due to cultural bias and the various wars on drugs, that we may eliminate all authentic shamanic practices before we have an opportunity to learn from them.On only a slight tangent, I have long been fascinated by the way animals react to different people. I can sit quietly, slow my breathing and heart rate, clear my mind, and enjoy the spectacle of "wild" animals casually comfortable with my presence--but it takes real effort on my part. My wife, on the other hand, can softly whistle and coo birds from the bushes and trees, and even startled animals often do not run from her.She is a truly gentle soul with great respect for the sovereignty of all life, and I have to say that many animals seem to sense her benevolence. I also know people who cause immediate distress in every animal they encounter: I simply don't trust those people.In all those remarkable people, I found no great interest or concern about whether their individual awareness would survive death. In fact, one common theme is that the I that so longs for survival is trivial, an illusion, maya, unimportant. It is the awareness unfettered by this local me-me-me that can enter the spirit realm, merge with the Void, find surcease from suffering, learn the greatest compassion.The most spiritual people I've known do not fret about gods or immortal souls. I'm still learning to sit still, but at last I don't fret about them either.

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Dost thou prate, rogue?
-Cassio

​

Real things always push back.
-William James